Gisela Colón Brings Monolith Sculptures To Bruce Museum And Puerto Rico

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Gisela Colón's sculptures begin with a paradox: they look engineered, yet they are rooted in memory, geology, and a long return to art.

The Puerto Rican artist, who first trained in law and built a career in environmental law in California, is now the subject of two institutional solo exhibitions -“Radiant Earth” at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, and“The Mountain, The Monolith” at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. Together, the shows mark a major career moment for Colón and a homecoming to the island where she grew up between San Juan and Bayamón.

Colón left San Juan in 1987 on a Truman scholarship and spent years practicing law while raising two sons. Art, though always present through her mother, a painter, remained secondary until her children left for college. Only then did she return to it full time. That delayed start has become part of the force of her work, which she describes as“organic minimalism.”

The phrase is apt. Colón's practice sits in conversation with Minimalism, Light and Space, and Land Art, but her sculptures are less interested in pure form than in the material histories embedded within them. At the Bruce, the exhibition includes wall-mounted“pods” that read as biomorphic and almost cellular, alongside taller monoliths that shift color as daylight moves through the gallery. The effect is quiet but unstable, as if the works are registering the room in real time.

Curators Margarita Karasoulas and Danielle O'Steen have emphasized how central material process is to that experience. Colón works with plastics, engineered pigments, aerospace-grade materials, and scientific processes, yet each piece is cast and layered by hand. Several of the monoliths in Greenwich reference Puerto Rican river systems, caves, and coastal formations, while the stones placed around them come from the California desert near her studio, creating a compressed landscape inside the museum.

Her newest paintings extend that same logic into another register, using meteorite dust and volcanic material. Across the body of work, Colón returns again and again to time, scale, and transformation - the body, the earth, and the deep structures that connect them. She has said that mountains feel internal to her, a way of describing not just subject matter but identification.

That sensibility reaches back to childhood. Her father was a chemist, her mother taught her to work with color, and she remembers peeling bark from eucalyptus trees on her grandfather's farm, watching layers reveal themselves and then heal. In Colón's hands, that early lesson becomes sculpture: a practice built from surface, fracture, and renewal, and now visible in two museums that frame her work as both deeply personal and broadly resonant.

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